-
About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
Contact The Fortnightly.
Books received: Updated list.
-
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
Time Out’s New York listings here.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein. Now running.
In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- A note on the Fortnightly’s ‘periodicity’.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement and submission guidelines.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- Newsletter
- Submission guidelines.
- Support for the World Oral Literature Project.
- The Fortnightly Review’s email list.
- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
- The Initial Prospectus of The Fortnightly Review.
- The Trollope Prize.
- The Editors and Contributors.
- An Explanation of the New Series.
- Subscriptions & Commerce.
-
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
.
Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
-
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
.
European populism? Departments
Subscribe
0 Comments
Somewhere else.
A Fortnightly Review
New Town Utopia
Produced, written, filmed by Christopher Ian Smith
With Jim Broadbent, Marc Barnacle, Shaun Badham, Penny Betteridge
A Cult Modern Film
Documentary | 15+ | 80 mins. | Release: 23 July 2018.
By SIMON COLLINGS.
RUN A SEARCH on ‘reputation of Basildon’ and you’ll find the Knowhere Guide. And in it, you’ll find the entry devoted to Basildon. And in that, you’ll find the list of ‘worst things’ about the town. Not surprisingly, the list is hardly encouraging: ‘The people. The pubs. The shops. The people. The crappy market. The people.’ ‘Loud mouthed thugs and scroats who swear a lot. Almost total lack of culture apart from drinking and eatin junk food.’ ‘The usual New Town heritage issues. No long term roots established.’ ‘Totally horibble [sic] and utterly dreadful. I lived there about 5 years ago. The emotional scars are still there. The total arse of the UK.’
Basildon wasn’t meant to be like this. The vision was for a place of architectural and natural beauty which would, it was hoped, create a better type of person.
In the interest of balance I checked the website’s list of ‘best things’. This included: ‘The A13 cos it takes u out of Basildon’; ‘there are none i hate it’; ‘watching louis’s head getting caved in with a plastic spoon’; ‘DOUBLE LOCKING MY FRONT DOOR AT NIGHT.’ A few people, a very small minority, had posted positive comments.
The narrative is structured around key passages from the speech to the House of Commons by Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, introducing the second reading of the New Towns Bill, on 2 May 1946. Silkin (via Hansard) said:
Some voices suggest that part of the problem lay with the temporary status of the development corporation which built the town. The local authority was expected to maintain and enhance the place once it was built, but did not do so. Over the years Brooke House, for example, became more and more run down, occupied mainly by drug addicts. All agree the town was a ‘tough’ place socially – territorial, ‘hard’. There’s little evidence of a ‘slum spirit’ surviving the transplanting of people.
The arts fare no better. In the early days there was a sense of the town being somewhere people believed in. The old Town Gate Theatre, since replaced, was a focal point for creativity. Punk had a big impact on the local music scene in the mid-1970s, leading to the development of other musical styles, Depeche Mode and Alison Moyet the most famous products of this period. Robert Marlow, interviewed in the film, was part of that scene, as was another contributor, former Vandals member Sue Ryder Paget. Through the 1980s, funding for the arts, and leisure facilities generally, was progressively reduced, part of a broader pattern of change across the country under the Thatcher government. The majority of those interviewed in the film are linked in some way to the arts, so this is an issue of particular significance for them.
From the beginning of the 1980s council-house tenants gained the right to buy their homes at heavily discounted prices. It was an offer too good to refuse for those who could afford it, though, as many in the film testify, it felt like a betrayal of principles and was something people were ashamed of. The demise of some industries led to factory closures in Basildon and rising unemployment. The work that was available was low paid. Faster train connections – originally the town had no station – led to many people travelling into London for work. Public assets were sold and the proceeds taken by the Treasury as national policy. Green spaces started to disappear, flogged off to developers, as Silkin’s vision for the place was dismantled.
Towards the end the film returns to a positive note. Contributors reject the image of Basildon as a dangerous, unpleasant place to live. They point to recent encouraging signs, such as the opening of a new art gallery in the town centre. A local teacher is optimistic, though he also recognises the challenges his students will face. The massive social experiment which was Basildon was ‘better done than not,’ the participants seem to conclude. The film is a kind of eulogy to the New Town — a poem offering no simple answers.
♦
As a young man Howard emigrated to the USA to try his hand at farming, but finding the going tough he moved to Chicago where he worked as a reporter. The architecture and design of Chicago, and other American cities, made a big impression on him. Back in the UK Howard pieced together a proposal for the creation of new ‘garden cities’, where industry would provide jobs, where the workers would have decent housing, and where good design and plenty of green space would create conditions for a new type of citizen to emerge. Bourneville and Port Sunlight were earlier experiments in this direction, but Howard wanted to create communities not tied to a single employer. He envisaged a network of these garden cities, connected through efficient transport systems, replacing the squalid and dehumanising city slums. His proposals were published in 1898 as To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow).
The creation of Letchworth Garden City began in 1903. But the project was under-capitalised from the start and the town grew slowly. Raising the kind of philanthropic capital Howard had hoped to attract proved challenging and the economic principles set out in his book were never fully implemented. But despite these limitations there was a pioneering spirit among the first residents, who were often caricatured by outsiders as earnest idealists. John Betjeman mocks the place in his poem ‘Huxley Hall’ as a ‘bright, hygienic hell’ — not somewhere for the ordinary ‘fallen’ mortal. Betjeman preferred his ‘lime juice’ with gin in it.
♦
Like New Town Utopia, Wesker’s play incorporates many voices and acknowledges the conflicts between interest groups. A narrator figure, the ‘town drunk’, provides a bemused, sometimes angry, commentary on the action. Reflecting on the conflict between the plotlanders and the development corporation he says:
Darkness, thunder and lightning follow, and the bungalows of the plotlanders are demolished.
Early on in the play, the narrator says:
This sense of loneliness is echoed by another character, Brenda, a young mother who feels isolated in her new council home, far away from her family still living in London.
A powerful image in the play, one recalled in the film, is of a group of children racing to find the end of a rainbow. Towards the end of Act One there is a scene where they run on the spot, in slow motion under strobe lighting – ‘the excitement of “the quest” on their young faces.’
♦
NEW TOWN UTOPIA has a personal resonance for me. I grew up on a council estate in Stevenage, the first of the New Towns and now in the process of becoming even newer. My parents moved to nearby Hitchin in 1970, when I was 14, though I continued to attend school in Stevenage, worked Saturdays in a bookshop there, and had friends in the town. I don’t recall any impressive civic architecture. My memory is of expanses of concrete, and street after street of uniform housing. There was generous provision for cyclists, plenty of parks, and we were on the very edge of the town, with fields a few hundred metres away. It was this which reconciled my mother to moving to Stevenage when my father, just out of the army, secured a job with Hawker Sidley, later part of British Aerospace. My mother had grown up in rural Hampshire, the descendent of generations of agricultural workers, and missed that environment. Later the fields near our house were swallowed by a ring road and more housing development.
Stevenage, like Basildon, has a reputation for toughness, but I don’t remember it being violent. Perhaps it became worse later. What I do remember is the lack of any serious culture. By my late teens I was desperate to escape from the existential wilderness of north Herts. Like many others I fled, never to look back. By the time Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in 1979 I had a degree from Oxford, having benefited from a Grammar School education and a student grant.
Younge locates the source of this estrangement in the fact that the town was the product of planning, not of organic growth. Though well provisioned, it had no real identity.
Whatever sense of alienation we felt was environmental rather than social…It’s just that we had no more reason to be there than anywhere else.
Playwright Vince O’Connell, one of the interviewees in New Town Utopia, echoes this sentiment on his website:
The recent announcement by the UK government of plans for 14 new ‘garden villages and towns’ is far more modest than the New Towns project, and is aimed at the middle class rather than the urban poor. There is talk of development being ‘locally led’, but it’s effectively another top-down initiative. ‘New communities’ will be created we’re told, with ‘village shops’ and ‘community centres’. Sound familiar? New Town Utopia offers an intelligent antidote to this kind of corporate rhetoric.
♦
Simon Collings lives in Oxford and has published poems, stories and critical essays in a range of journals including Stride, Journal of Poetics Research, Tears in the Fence, Ink Sweat and Tears, Lighthouse and PN Review. Out West, his first chapbook, was published by Albion Beatnik (2017), and a second chapbook, Stella Unframed, has just been released by The Red Ceilings Press.
Related
Publication: Monday, 9 July 2018, at 11:26.
Options: Archive for Simon Collings. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.